Transitions
by FelinesAndPhoenixes
Summary: What happened to Veronica after the movie? (Cross over with Next to Normal where she becomes Diana Goodman.) Contains a lot of psychological stuff. Can be read even with no knowledge of Next to Normal, b/c it's more about the psychology than the specific character.


**Title: **Transitions

**Summary: **What happened to Veronica after the ending of Heathers? How did she go on to become Diana Goodman?

**Notes: **This is a crossover with Next to Normal, which is an amazing musical. If you haven't heard or seen it, there is a video playlist and a soundtrack playlist up on Youtube.

**Disclaimer: **I don't own anything from Heathers or Next to Normal.

**More notes: **If you're reading this but haven't seen Next to Normal, it's about the Goodman family, focusing on the teenage daughter (Natalie) and the mother (Diana). The mother has paranoid schizophrenia and delusions, and sees a hallucination of her deceased son, who died as a baby, but who appears as a teenager.

At first, after his death, Veronica saw JD all the time. It never occurred to her that it was strange, because she'd been in and out of the hospital for injury and trauma and the amount of drugs and sedatives that she'd been on kind of made everything blur together and seem like it wasn't real. It didn't occur to her that he wasn't real. Her parents pulled her out of school, and the family moved away, and after a while it seemed like none of it could have really even happened. Her parents had her in and out of different doctor's offices, and diagnoses were thrown around, but nothing was ever conclusive. Doctors assumed that she was a normal teenage in mourning for a handful of friends who had committed suicide. They'd given her ativan and valium and told her parents that the symptoms would lessen with time. There were muffled conversations that she eavesdropped on through closed office doors, and what she got out of it was that her parents didn't want her seeing JD, but she couldn't figure out why.

She finished high school in another state, unaware that the reason that she couldn't make friends was because she was the weird girl who talked to herself. It seemed to her like she had probably just gone back to being the outcast freak that she had been all her life.

He showed up every day in some capacity or another, sometimes taunting her, sometimes acting like nothing had changed between them, saying that the two of them were destined to be together. She didn't notice the way that her parents watched her, the worried looks on their faces when he came to dinner. She simply assumed that they didn't want her to be with someone who had moved across state lines just to be with her.

He snuck in through her window some nights, and it was just like the old times. Her various therapists, and which one she was seeing changed often, asked her about him sometimes. Was she still seeing him? Did she want to talk about the bomb incident? She told it the way that she remembered. That he tried to kill himself, but that he failed and was just as alive as she was now. For some reason that she didn't understand, this lead to more drugs and treatments.

She was accepted into college after graduation, and in one last desperate push to get the treatment right, her current doctor changed her medication. A few weeks into the treatment plan, he just stopped showing up. A week or so later her thoughts cleared and she was able to focus, to remember. JD was gone forever, she knew that. She could remember everything, and as much as it hurt, she had to move on. She moved again to a different state and started college, going by her middle name, Diana. She died her hair blonde, cut it short, started dressing differently. Everything that she could change, she did. She was sure that no one from back home would think twice about running into her as Diana Sawyer, even if she ran into them now.

She met Dan completely by accident a few years later. They were both architecture students, both part of the way through their degree. They bumped into each other at a café on campus and talked like they had been friends all of their lives. They went out that evening and shared a couple of beers and became almost immediate friends. They started dating and they were absolutely inseparable. Medicated and in a stable relationship with someone who was, thank the lord, more or less normal, she was pretty sure that everything was going to be ok. She maintained a 4.0 GPA, joined a sorority, was brilliant.

She overwhelmed her boyfriend, who was admittedly pretty bland. She was constantly dragging him out on adventures. Bowling, dancing, skydiving, zip lining, rollerblading, to get weird piercings, dye their hair, fly to Europe on spring break. Sometimes, Dan Goodman wondered why this fascinating woman wanted to be with someone like him. Whenever he asked, she would tell him that she liked him because of how normal he was, how grounded and in control of his life he was.

The baby wasn't planned. It was as much of a surprise to Diana as everything else that she did was. Dan asked her to marry him as soon as he found out, and they eloped to Portland, which wasn't the most romantic of settings, but it was doable at the time. It rained, and she'd thought the entire thing was absolutely ridiculous.

Back home, they moved in together, sharing a small apartment. Dan would finish college, and she would stay a home. Under advisement of her doctor, she stopped her medication, but everything was fine now, and there was no way that it was going to go back to the way it had been. She knew it, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Things were still going perfectly when the baby was born. Dan finished his degree, got a job. Their son, Gabe, was perfect. She was the happiest that she had ever been in her life, and she was sure that there was nothing that could shatter her good mood.

Things were great until 18 months later, when everything went downhill at a frightening pace. The baby was ill, terrifyingly ill. On that fateful, rainy night, she and Dan were rushing him to the emergency room in the middle of the night, holding her cold, shaking child against her chest. Everything after that was a blur. Shouting at doctors, mayhem, panic. When the doctor came to her and told her that they hadn't been able to save the baby, it was like something inside her had broken, far more than it ever had been before. For a while, she'd just disappeared somewhere inside herself, and had been completely unresponsive.

A few days later, she'd come back to awareness in a white room in the hospital. She remembered that she'd gotten some bad news from the doctor, and that she'd fainted. Everything else was hazy, which she attributed to whatever was in the iv in her left hand. Where was Dan? Why had they taken Gabe from her? She was alone in the hospital room, and the flashing numbers on the clock read 12:30. It was after midnight, of course they wouldn't allow a visitor to be waiting in her room. She wanted to panic, but she calmed herself with the thought that her husband would come in the morning to tell her what was going on, when she was getting out of this place.

A noise from the doorway alerted her to the doorknob turning, and she jumped, eyes moving to the door in trepidation. Probably just a nurse, she reassured herself. But then the door opened and someone slipped into the door. The door closed behind the person, and the figure came into focus in the darkness. Tall, slender and serious, dark hair falling across his face, all in black, trench coat flapping around him ominously, none other than JD stood in her doorway. In his arms, reaching out towards her impatiently was her eighteen month old son, Gabe. "For fuck's sake, Veronica," he said, "I would have thought you could at least keep track of a baby."

**Notes: **End. Sorry, it was more of a ramble than a story, kind of, but I think it makes sense. I was going for drama on the ending, but I don't know if I got it or not.


End file.
